9 Things That Still Bother Me About 90s Commercials

1. Why Is The Fruit Loops Toucan British?

According to Wikipedia, toucans are native to Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. None of those places should give a toucan a British accent, with the POSSIBLE exception of the British Virgin Islands, but those toucans would really sound more like this. Simply put, there is absolutely no good reason for Toucan Sam to sound British. Must just be a pretentious holdover from his semester abroad in Europe visiting Count Chocula.

2. Mentos Commercials Give the Worst Advice

Don't let the breezy, synth-y tones of the awesome jingle fool you. The genius ideas these characters have after chomping into a Mento will, without exception, make their situations worse. Like, that perfectly nice-looking older lady is just gonna get on the up elevator and come talk to you now. All you did was hurt her feelings for no reason. Also, you will get yelled at for hitching a ride on an airport luggage carrier, it is illegal to get into a stranger's car to cross the street, and wet paint does not look like pinstripes.

3. Why Were Kids' Heads Constantly Turning Into Stuff?

From candy to salad dressing, it seemed there was not a single product in the 90s that failed to magically transmogrify a child's head into a food item. Or grow a clown afro. By the way, it is a ridiculous joke that Gushers were the ones to do this most memorably, because their promises of a gushing, juice-dripping too-much-to-handle fruitsplosion were completely false. Gushers are delicious, but they are filled with, at best, a scant half-drop of congealed fruity gel and have never once been known to actually gush.

4. What Happened to Chef From Kid's Cuisine?

During the 90s:

After the 90s:

In the good old days of the early 90s, BJ and the Chef were best pals, a true MegaMeal Posse till the end, when they'd gallop off on their frozen-food boxes into the sunset. But sometime between then and the late aughts, the Chef got the axe (which of course begs the question: WHO is cooking the cuisines now? Or was "The Chef" always just a figurehead?) and BJ was either replaced with a much thinner penguin named Kid Cuisine or (more likely) he was forced to change his name and developed an eating disorder from the stress of being separated from his sole friend and colleague. Pretty sad stuff.

5. Why Was Fred Flintstone So Bad At Recognizing His Best Friend?

Listen. I am all for giving Fred the benefit of the doubt here. It's MAYBE defensible that he gets tricked out of his fave cereal by his best pal and neighbor ONCE. But after the first time it happens, you'd think he would kind of be on the alert for this sort of chicanery. Barney's disguises aren't exactly high-tech. He's usually just wearing, like, a hat. Meanwhile, let's not even go into the psychological trappings of why Barney doesn't just pedal his car down to Safestone's and buy his own goddamn cereal. That, along with how Zubaz pants were so popular and what floam is made of, is one of the great mysteries of the 90s.

6. Who Signed Off On the "Grape Escape" Board Game?

"Boss, I got a boffo idea for our next hit game! You remember that 30-year-old film The Great Escape, in which Steve McQueen escapes from a German WWII POW camp? You know how all modern kids have definitely heard of and love that movie? Well, get this: this game is called...The GRAPE Escape. Like the movie, but I replaced the word Great with Grape! Is that good or what? Hmm? What's the narrative? Well...a bunch of grapes escaping, I guess. Maybe from...a jam factory! See, it's perfect. Grape even RHYMES with Escape!"

"By golly, Johnson, you've done it again. I'm promoting you to CEO!"

7. Transforming Transformers Takes Way More Time Than That

The commercials make transforming look reeeeal easy for a process that was fairly time-intensive IRL. I myself never actually played with Transformers, but that's precisely because they look like they are full of annoyingly intricate little parts that take forever to manipulate. Well, partly because of that, partly because I was afraid of the commercials. Too many explosions.

(Separate but related issue: no one in Nerf commercials ever had to reload. Most likely this is because showing the kids running around picking up their used ammo off the ground would've required buying a lot more ad time.)

8. No One Actually Brings Their Toys Into a Jungle

G.I. Joe and other companies beloved for their useless pieces of plastic (sorry, "toys") were constantly setting their commercials in picturesque jungles and like, battle-torn desert mountain ranges, despite the fact that their products would inevitably never venture outside the mold-smelling carpeted basement they were destined for. Even if you did take your toys into the backyard, your yard probably wasn't equipped with vines, a fog machine, and a to-scale ice pond. If it were, you wouldn't need to play with toys to make it fun.

9. Everything About The Crossfire Commercial

Okay, right off the bat, "it's sometime in the future"? Why not specify a date? Would that be so difficult? Or are we just concerned that saying an actual date might hurt this ad's chances of being 100% TIMELESS? And why is it even set in the future at all? The concept of "crossfire" (you know, that totally child-friendly term that refers to GUN COMBAT) is not inherently futuristic. Secondly, how the hell do you play this game? It looks like a confused-but-angry cross between Hungry Hungry Hippos and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, except less fun than that sounds. Thirdly, the thunder and clouds imply that there's a storm going on, but evidently it's not raining enough to put out the FIRE raging in the battle arena that no one is concerned about (must be a dry summer storm). Fourthly, who is in this crowd of people cheering when kids arrive on their hoverboards and then also cheering when one of them spins into the sun and disappears, which apparently is his punishment for losing? Are they recreational Crossfire fans? There is so little about this commercial that makes sense, "who would buy this game?" is not even one of my top 10 questions.

Special thanks to Hopper for cantankerously pointing out many of these bothers and to Falcon for his thoughtful gif-giving.